3Ware + Promise?

[SoulkeepHL]

Since I won't get a generic response to my support request for a few days (and then another week or two before I might get relevant info from a live person), I'm wondering if anyone has had problems with 3ware controllers and promise controllers in the same system. I just purchased a 7506-12 to run a new array, and have some existing (large) backup drives attached to a Maxtor (Promise) Ultra133 add in controller. The 3ware is in a 64bit/66mhz slot on my supermicro 370dl3, and the promise is in a 32bit/33mhz slot. With the promise controller installed, the 3ware bios wont load itself while the system is booting, but works happily without the promise installed. Anyone run into anything like this?

 

[Snugglebear]

This type of error is fairly common and happen with all sorts of controllers, even ones from the same companies; motherboard BIOSes aren't all that bright, they start from the first slot of the first peripheral bus and work their way down, detecting devices and running any BIOSes those have in the process. Sometimes you can fiddle with controller/system BIOS settings and get things to work, sometimes you can't. This is due to how the BIOSes are written, and that's completely out of your control. What you can do is fiddle with the cards' settings or (not in your case because of the multiple PCI busses) reorder the cards in their slots. Occasionally a well-produced card BIOS will allow you to disable it, forcing it only to initialize the drives and skip over the boot and other BS, thus allowing the motherboard to happily run the next BIOS on the next controller, and so on, until something takes control & boots (whether this device be integrated or addon, doesn't matter). Now here's the major catch - a lot of cards and boards have really crappy BIOSes and either: a) do not allow the user to disable their boot function b) fail to initialize the drives/arrays if disabled c) execute and stay resident in that ever so critical few KB of system memory available for booting and cause following BIOSes to puke from lack of available memory.

All this boils down to you spending some quality time dicking around with BIOS settings on all the controllers and probably the system, too. You're going to go through a lot of crap flipping bits, rebooting, flipping more bits, rebooting, ad infinitum. Whatever you do, just make sure the boot controller has its BIOS run last. If this is not possible due to the various BIOSes, be prepared for the companies to point fingers at each other, then laugh when you tell them you need them to write an updated BIOS.